Design for Print // Study Task 1

Identify a minimum of 5 examples of the effective/creative use of print in the following areas of design:

• Branding and Identity
• Packaging and Promotion
• Publishing & Editorial
• Information & Wayfinding

Branding and Identity

'The visible elements of a brand (such as colours, design, logotype, name, symbol) that together identify and distinguish the brand in the consumers' mind.'

An example of an easily recognisable brand is coca cola, their trademark is one of the most famous worldwide.  The red colour is copyrighted and other brands of coca cola are not allowed to use the exact same colour.

Packaging and Promotion

A campaign to try and sell more Lee jeans, perhaps not the most ergonomic of designs but it is definitely eye catching and will get people talking about the brand which will boost sales.

Publishing and Editorial

Andrej Pejic | Tiago Molinos | Follow Magazine 5 Editorial

Futuristic editorial - Vice Germany magazine

VicRoads-AnnualReport2010

Information and Wayfinding

http://www.coolinfographics.com

http://calm-the-ham.tumblr.com

Lecture 9 // Identity

Theories of Identity

• ESSENTIALISM (traditional approach)
• Our biological make up makes us who we are.
• We all have an inner essence that makes us who we are.
• POST MODERN THEORISTS DISAGREE
• Post-Modern theorists are ANTI- ESSENTIALIST 

The more your nose veers from the vertical the less intelligent you are.

Anglo- teutonic people are "racially superior" to negros and irish iberian, kind of like the arian race.

Hieronymous Bosch - a flemish painter, in his painting Christ carrying the cross, the only ordinary looking people is Christ and the white people.  Chris Ofili is a black artist who painted the Virgin Mary black.  

Historical phases of Identity Douglas Kellner – Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and
Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern, 1992
pre modern identity – personal identity is stable – defined
by long standing roles
Modern identity – modern societies begin to offer a wider range of social roles. Possibility to start ‘choosing’ your identity, rather than simply being born into it. People start to ‘worry’ about who they are

Post-modern identity – accepts a ‘fragmented ‘self’. Identity is constructed  

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.  E.g in a modern day world people showing off their i phones and other expensive goods.  Also they do this through the use of Fashion.  The upper class will always look to wear something new to keep the distinction between their class and the lower classes.

Georg Simmel

‘The feeling of isolation
is rarely as decisive and intense when one actually finds oneself physically alone, as when one is a stranger without relations, among many physically close persons, at a party, on the train, or in the traffic of a large city’

Simmel suggests that:
because of the speed and mutability of modernity, individuals withdraw into themselves to find peace
He describes this as

‘the separation of the subjective from the objective life’ 

‘Discourse Analysis’
• Identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us.
What is a discourse ?
• ‘... a set of recurring statements that define a particular cultural ‘object’ (e.g., madness, criminality, sexuality) and provide concepts and terms through which such an object can be studied and discussed.’ Cavallaro, (2001)

Possible Discourses
• Age
• Class
• Gender
• Nationality
• Race/ethnicity
• Sexual orientation
• Education
• Income

Discourses to be considered

• Class
• Nationality
• Race/ethnicity
 • Gender and sexuality 

Class

Mass Observation, a group of posh upper class people going to see how the other half live.

Slightly mocking photograph of middle class people at the beach in brighton.

Race/ Ethnicity

To be a black artist how do you portray your ethnicity.  'No woman, no cry' links with Bob Marley song and also he has used the rasta colours here.

Gender and Sexuality

‘Edmund Bergler, an American psychoanalyst

writing in the 1950s, went much further, both in

condemning the ugliness of fashion and in relating

it to sex. He recognised that the fashion industry

is the work not of women, but of men. Its

monstrosities, he argued, were a “gigantic

unconscious hoax” perpetrated on women by the

arch villains of the Cold War –male homosexuals

(for he made the vulgar assumption that all dress

designers are “queers”). Having first, in the 1920s,

tried to turn women into boys, they had latterly

expressed their secret hatred of women by forcing

them into exaggerated, ridiculous, hideous clothes’ 

Group Project // Inkspire

1.The nature of your business

Business name

Inkspire

Business activity

Illustration 
-Prints
-Clothing
-Stationery

Mission statement

Business objectives
What are you plans to achieve your sales target in the first 12 months?
What new products or services will you introduce in the following two years to grow your business?
What is your long term / 5 year goal?

The people in the business
How many people are employed?
What are their roles?

6. What is the structure of your business?

Describe the organisation – draw a diagram if appropriate

7. What is the legal status of your business?

Is it Limited Company or partnership, social enterprise, cooperative or are you a sole trader?
Why have you chosen this status – what are the advantages

________________________________________________________________________________
2. Resources

1. Products or services

Describe the range of goods/services you are selling 

Say what percent of turnover each will provide ( e.g. boutique – 20% clothing, 60% jewellery, 20% hats)

2. What resources do you require?

What equipment do you need (e.g. office equipment and furniture, display and lighting for a shop, studio equipment, company car / van)
How much will these cost ? ( to the nearest £3,000 )

3. How much stock do you need any stock to start your business?

 (e.g.  clothes for a boutique, food for a café, books for a book shop)

How much will your sales stock cost ?  (to the nearest £3,000)

_________________________________________________________________________________
3. Prices

1. How have you worked out your prices?

State what your pricing strategy is

2. How do your prices compare with your competitors?

Name 3 competitors and give evidence of their prices

4. Customers

1. What evidence do you have that anyone will buy your product / service? 

Is it a popular product / service currently provided by lots of others
Is your idea completely new?
Is there increasing demand for your product / service?

2. Who are these people?

Use segmentation to describe your typical consumer

If yours is B2B – describe the market sector (e.g. retail, food, leisure, SMEs, local bands, entertainment industry)

3. Where are they?

It may help to include diagrams or maps

4. How many are there of them?

This must be described in numbers form.  (e.g. population, tourist visitor numbers, number of local bands, number of retail outlets)

5. Why would they buy from you rather than anyone else?

Provide a SWOT analysis to show that you have analysed your strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your potential competitors 

6. How much will the average customer spend with you?

How often will they spend that amount with you?

Will your sales fluctuate due to external forces ( e.g. seasons or cultural / sporting events)

_________________________________________________________________________
5. How will you promote your business?

How will you advertise your products / services?

(advertising is not compulsory)

What other marketing methods would be effective for you? 

Personal Selling

Promotions

Public relations

Direct Marketing (Targeted marketing)

Internet

__________________________________________________________________________
6. Total set up costs 

Legal costs 

What legal costs might you incur in setting up your business, on protecting your intellectual property, registering with Companies House ( if appropriate) or using a solicitor to look at your contracts?

2. Resources

How much Capital expenditure in the first year?

How much will you spend on materials and goods for sale for the first 6 months ( Direct Costs)

How much will be spent on bills and overheads for the first 6 months (Indirect costs)

3. Marketing

Cost of promoting your business for the first year

4. How will you finance the business start up?

Lecture 7 // Celebrity Culture

This lecture looks at: • The history of celebrity
• The relationship between photography/film/tv and celebrity
• The cultural significance of celebrities
• How contemporary identity and celebrity are
intertwined
Contemporary icons as case studies 

The Artist, 2011

Won golden globes for its portrayal of its era

Josephine Baker (1906-1975)

• Baker costumed for the Danse banane from the Folies Bergères production Un Vent de Folie in Paris in 1927 

Had a pet Cheetah which sometimes escaped into the orchestra pit.
• a muse for contemporary authors, painters, designers, and sculptors including Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior. 

Josephine Baker - American mixed heritage, found fame in france for her exotic dancing, her success coincides with the Art Deco Movement which takes influence from african art.  In the second world war she worked for the resistance, using her film and performance career.  She helped people get visas and passports to help people leave france during the war.  She has a public and private persona.  There are refs to her in contemporary popular culture, Beyonce takes inspiration from her banana skirt costume.  


Marilyn Monroe

• Actress, singer,
• Relationships with Arthur Miller and the Kennedys
• Iconic as a ‘sex symbol’
• Her death freezes this status as her image will never disintegrate 

Andy Warhol- Pop Art
• Her face becomes a mask as it is endlessly repeated in publicity, the news,
• The idea that there is a different woman underneath ie: Norma Jean Baker prevails
• Circumstances of her death seem to confirm/not confirm this simultaneously as she becomes ‘myth’ 

Making a comment about how hard it is to conceive a celebrity as anything but a celebrity.

Audrey Flack’s Marilyn (1977)
• In the tradition of the 16th/17th Century Vanitas painting where objects in the image have symbollic meaning
• Photorealism- airbrush 

Elvis Presley
• Warhol uses an image of him acting the classic American hero- the cowboy
• Blurs our vision, reminds us that the image is all we can see
• His home Graceland is a place of pilgrimage for fans, then a museum after his death 

Warhols Factory photographed by Richard Avedon (1969) 

Warhol perhaps the first person to think of turning normal people into stars by photographing them.  People on the edges of society being made into stars.

The Jacksons as a brand

• Musicians /performers
• 1971 The Jackson 5 had an animated cartoon on TV
• 1976 they star in a comedy where they act as themselves 



Michael Jackson

• The changes in Michaels appearance are interpreted as reactions to the abuse he and his family suffered at the hands of their father.
• He looks less like his father by reducing his African American features: nose, skin colour, afro hair etc. 

Study Task 3 // Panopticism

Choose an example of one aspect of contemporary culture that is, in your opinion, panoptic. Write an explanation of this, in approximately 400 words, employing key Foucauldian language, such as 'Docile Bodies' or 'self-regulation, and using not less than 5 quotes from the text 'Panopticism' in Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave McMillan.

refer also to the lecture, 'Panopticism' (25 /10 /12), and the accompanying seminar.

The panopticon was a building providing the ultimate method of surveillance designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.  The architecture of the building meant that one supervisor could observe all the occupiers of the institution from a central tower “shut up a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy.  By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery... constantly visible.”  [Panopticism, Michel Foucault]  The fact that the inmates of the panopticon were constantly being watched meant that they behaved in a way one does when they know they are being watched, unlike in old fashioned dungeons where the inmate is enveloped in darkness and could be getting up to no good.  “So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour.”  [Panopticism, Michel Foucault pg 61.]

In the modern day world, panopticism is visible in many forms.  CCTV Cameras in shops, lifts, museums, nearly everywhere, hospital wards and lecture theatres.  However a fairly new method compared to these is Social Networking.  A great example of this is the social networking site, Facebook, now with over one billion users it acts as a panopticon in the form of information sharing.  Similar to the surveillance method used for patients with the plague at the end of the seventeenth century, which Foucault talks about “a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor... this document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his conditions’”  [Michel Foucault pg 61.]  This has a lot in common with Facebook, however online people choose to share their information.  The concept of viewing someones profile, whether or not you are friends with them and having access to personal information such as name, age, where you live, current and previous job, current and previous places of study, gender, sexuality, interests and pictures acts as a panopticon in a slightly different way from Bentham's architectural design.  Instead of there being one supervisor or “watchman” everyone in the Facebook community can watch other peoples Facebook activity while they themselves may be being watched also.  A user’s presence on Facebook is “constantly visible” which results in many people creating a false representation of themselves online by only adding attractive photo’s and removing the unattractive or advertising a lifestyle they don’t truly have.

Critical Positions on Popular Culture

Critically define ‘popular culture’

• Contrast ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’

• Introduce Cultural Studies & Critical Theory

• Discuss culture as ideology

• Interrogate the social function of popular culture 

What is Culture?
• ‘One of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’
• general process of intellectual, spiritual & aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time
• a particular way of life
• works of intellectual and especially artistic significance’ 

Marx's Concept of Base / Superstructure 

Base

forces of production - materials, tools, workers, skills, etc.

relations of production - employer/employee, class, master/slave, etc

Superstructure

social institutions - legal, political, cultural
forms of consciousness - ideology *

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Marx, Communist Manifesto) 

We live in a capitalist society with capitalist relations.  This argues that all forms of culture are a direct reflex and are conditioned by that form of material reality.

Culture is produced by the material reality of the world

4 definitions of ‘popular’
– Well liked by many people
– Inferior kinds of work
– Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
– Culture actually made by the people themselves 

Popular Culture is inferior to real Culture

Popularism  and trying to be commercialised, popular culture made by the masses for the masses, the direct opposite of traditional culture.

Culture made by urban youth for urban youth... What happens when that gets stolen does it become culture?

Heavy industrialisation and urbanisation, a hyper development under capitalism.  Clear class divides started to emerge.  Mass factory work, very clear who the rich were and who the poor were.  Working class area's slums and ghettos and affluent area's for the upper class.  Because of this separation an autonomous separation of the working class began, a culture made by the workers for the workers which was made for profit.  Entrepreneurs started selling and making a living off things like music halls.  What occured here was not just entertainment but a tendency to talk about working class life, political experiences and this gave birth to chartism - to give working class people the vote.

"Culture is disinterested, it doesn't have politics because it's more important than that"  Seeks to minister the diseased spirit of our times

High Culture and Anarchy or High Culture and Low Culture.

Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’

‘The working class... raw and half developed... long lain half hidden amidst it’s poverty and squalor... now issuing from it’s hiding place to assert an Englishmans heaven born privelige to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it is"

Mass culture represents a threat to social authority

They argued that popular culture actually maintain the ruling class, the social system that we live in.  

Frankfurt School :
Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century – era of “late capitalism”
Defined “The Culture Industry” :
2 main products – homogeneity & predictability
“All mass culture is identical” :
‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten’.
‘Movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art. The truth, that they are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. ... The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. ... The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle. ... film, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part ... all mass culture is identical.’ 

‘One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own situation, it reactivates the objects produced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition... Their most powerful agent is film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’ 

YCN Brief // Visual Research

Feel Good Drinks Branding:

Below is an image that came with the project pack, so it must mean that it is the most up to date branding for feel good.  It is my job to make it stand out more on the shelf and make people 'feel good.'  I intend to use the knowledge I've gained in colour theory to help the labels make people smile, while still keeping in mind the natural idea behind the brand - eg no fluorescent colours!

Pre-existing advertisements for the brand.

The branding is very natural, using muted colours and quite playful with the spots and banners and little characters.  I think it looks good and trustworthy because of this.

These are even more playful and surely will help people 'feel good,'  just the bottle that needs a little work.

Other similar brands that are out there:

Froosh, froosh seems to be a drink aimed at graphic designers but who knows, I don't want to just use typography in my designs which will then probably limit my target market.

Innocent Smoothies

Every innocent smoothie you buy with a woolly hat, 25p will be donated to Age UK.  This will definitely entice people into buying the product because the hats are quirky, fun and cute, and donating money to charity is an added bonus.

Vitamin Water has more of a medical look than the other drinks, this is something I want to avoid throughout my designs.

'This water' has simple clean and fresh packaging design however they aren't particularly outstanding on a shelf.  The small illustrations are nice but they also seem irrelevant.

Examples of Good Food/Drinks Packaging:

Designed by Yunyeen Yong, thinking outside the box here.  Interesting format and good use of colour.

Clear & Simple, not too much information on the package makes it easy on the eye.

 Interesting concept below, I want these!